"Patriot" Profile #3

Every Man a King: The Rise and Fall of the Montana Freemen

Last Modified May 6, 1996.

Copyright May 1996 by Mark Pitcavage. No duplication or
commercial use of this document may be made without the express
consent of the author.

Introduction: In terms of America's ongoing struggle
against antigovernment extremists, only the Oklahoma City bombing
of April 19, 1995 has surpassed the saga of the militants of
"Justus Township" in remote eastern Montana in terms of
media coverage. In terms of actual importance, what the Montana
Freemen have done--and what similar groups across the country
continue to do--may well eclipse a solitary act of terrorism by a
few angry individuals. For the Montana Freemen have been waging a
quiet war against the rest of the nation for several years now, a
war fought with computers and comptrollers' warrants, liens and
legal briefs. For the first time, here is their complete story.

Every Man a King: The Rise and Fall of the Montana Freemen

"Every man a king, every man a
king, you can be a millionaire." So went the catchy campaign
tune for Louisiana Senator Huey Long. Long, in the troubling
economic times of the 1930s, won a following with his "Share
the Wealth" plan, in which he proposed to alleviate people's
suffering by using the power of the federal government to
redistribute the nation's wealth.

Now, in the troubling economic times of the 1990s, a new group
of people have arisen to give a new, contemporary meaning to
Long's famous song. People can become kings--or "sovereign
citizens"--not by embracing the federal government but by
rejecting it, along with most other forms of authority. And
groups of these sovereign citizens have come up with a novel way
by which any person can become a millionaire--by issuing their
own money. The most infamous of these right-wing anarchists are
the Montana Freemen, who spawned an extralegal empire in the
wilderness of Montana, using not AK-47s but legal briefs, not
military uniforms but the Uniform Commercial Code. But they
wavered between between being patriotic paralegal-guerillas and
simple frauds, and ended up bringing down upon themselves the
enmity not only of the hated federal government, but friends and
neighbors as well. Federal and state governments, once besieged
by the filings of the Freemen, now were laying siege to the
Freemen themselves, at a little compound labeled "Justus
Township" near Jordan, Montana.

ROOTS

To understand the roots of the Montana Freemen, like so many
other elements of today's so-called "patriot" movement,
one has to go back to Posse Comitatus, the nebulous
antigovernment movement founded in 1969 by retired dry cleaner
Henry L. Beach. Beach, a former Silver Shirt (a 1930s-era
pro-Nazi group), argued that the only legitimate government was
local government. The highest legitimate elected official in the
country was the county sheriff, who could form juries and call
out the able-bodied men of the county to enforce the law.
Naturally enough, Beach and other members of the movement were
strongly opposed to the federal government, especially those
parts of it which dealt with money, the Internal Revenue Service
and the Federal Reserve System. The IRS draws its authority from
the Sixteenth Amendment, which Posse members (and other tax
resisters) believe was not lawfully ratified; thus, it is
unconstitutional. Moreover, suggests the Posse, the revenue laws,
if examined carefully, say that income tax is voluntary for
individuals. The Federal Reserve System, on the other hand, was
not a lawful arm of the government at all, but rather, as one
Posse publication put it, "a private monopoly which neither
the people nor the states authorized in the constitution."
It printed paper money which clearly was not allowed by the
Constitution. The racist elements of the Posse--which did not
include the whole movement, particularly after it expanded in the
early 1980s--went further, to argue that the Federal Reserve was
controlled by a small group of international Jewish bankers, who
profit by destroying the United States in a mire of debt and
paper money. Many Posse members adhered to the virulently racist
sect Christian Identity.

Related to the Posse was the township movement, led in part by
Walt P. Mann III, of Bloomington, Utah, which took root in Utah,
Wisconsin, and other states. Township advocates argued for
setting up small sovereign communities, over which no other level
of government could have power. In Wisconsin, the Posse set up a
"constitutional township" on a 1400-acre plot at
Tigerton Dells; there, warning signs posted "Federal Agents
Keep out; Survivors will be Prosecuted." The Township
appointed its own judges and foreign ambassadors.

Accompanying the quasi-anarchistic attitudes of the Posse was
a no-holds-barred attitude as to what should be done to those
seen to violate the principles held dear by the Posse. Henry
Beach recommended punishing government officials "who commit
criminal acts or who violate their oath of office" by having
the posse remove them "to the most populated intersection of
streets in the township and, at high noon, be hung by the neck,
the body remaining until sundown as an example to those who would
subvert the law." Many Posse members began to wear small
gold handman's nooses on their lapels.

In the 1970s, the Posse was a small but irritating extremist
group. Dispersed across the country, but finding support
primarily in the Northwest and the Great Plains states, it
numbered in the thousands (a 1976 FBI report suggested that
membership could range from 12,000 to 50,000). Particularly
troublesome was the Wisconsin Posse, headquartered at Tigerton
Dells (where, in the form of Family Farm Preservation, it still
operates) which disrupted government meetings and assaulted
public officials. In the early 1980s, however, a severe farm
crisis which resulted in financial loss and foreclosures for many
small farmers allowed the Posse to reach out to a more
mainstream--and thus larger--audience. Farmers in Kansas,
Nebraska, Wisconsin, the Dakotas, and elsewhere, looked to the
Posse for help. The Posse offered up targets for people to blame:
the courts, the money system, the federal government, the Jews.
Illegal activities--including counterfeiting, paramilitary
training, bombmaking, threats against public officials, and tax
resisting--greatly increased. The movement found a martyr in tax
resister Gordon Kahl of North Dakota, who died in a shootout with
law enforcement officers after being tracked down for his
participation in another shootout which killed two federal
marshals and wounded three others.

Shootouts, however, were rare. Far more common were the legal
battles waged by Posse members, which included two basic
strategies. One was the placing of frivolous liens on the
property of public officials who opposed or angered them, notably
IRS agents. Since the liens were without cause, they had no legal
weight, but until they were removed, they could damage credit
ratings or interfere with the buying and selling of property. The
second was the simple tactic of flooding the courts with legal
documents, filings, motions and appeals, often using convoluted
and archaic language, which clogged the court system and
frustated judges and prosecutors. Associated with this was the
tactic, practiced in some areas, of establishing so-called
"common law courts," which were vigilante courts that
often threatened public officials. Typical of many others was
David Scott Clark, in 1986 a 78-year old automotive garage
operator in Phoenix who, along with several others who called
themselves "freemen" and "sovereign
citizens," filed so many frivolous suits that a Maricopa
county judge issued a court order restricting court responses to
them. Foreshadowing the rhetoric of the mid-1990s, Clark
suggested the order was the work of people who wanted a
"one-world government."

However, by the late 1980s, Posse activity had died down. Many
of its leaders were dead, in prison, or lying low. Few found tax
resisting particularly profitable, except those who taught the
theories to others for a price. Because it never had a strong
organization or national focus, it died out in some areas, stayed
alive in others. Perhaps the best way to characterize it would be
as a dormant volcano, manifesting little activity on the outside
but possessing a fiery heat deep down, just waiting for some
shaking of the earth to open up a new channel through which lava
could once again flow.

FOUNDERS

Among the states in which the Posse was active was Montana,
sparsely populated and inhabited by people who believed in
minding their own business--and that the government should mind
its own. "With our Democracy deteriorated into hypocracy
[sic]..." read one recruiting notice in Montana for the
Posse in 1974, "the time has come for action." Other
organizations such as the Montana Vigilantes continued the Posse
ideology.

It is unclear whether any such groups lasted into the 1990s,
but clearly there was a part of Montana's small population that
was receptive to such beliefs. They were susceptible to the siren
songs of people like Roy Schwasinger, head of the tax protest
group We the People, based in Colorado. Schwasinger travelled the
country, including Montana, relating his theories--for the small
sum of $300--on how the Federal Reserve was illegitimate, the
money system worthless, and debts irrelevant. Schwasinger would
later get his own come-uppance, on charges of fraud, but not
before he had managed to convince a great many people that much
of government was unconstitutional and illegitimate. Among the
converts were numerous Montanans.

One of the Montanans attracted to the ideology espoused by
Posse Comitatus was Leroy Schweitzer. A stubborn man by
temperament, Schweitzer came to resent deeply what he saw as
government interference in his life. A crop duster in Montana and
Idaho, he refused to get a license to fly his plane, leading to
warrants for his arrest on federal charges. He also refused to
pay taxes, which caused the Internal Revenue Service in November
1992 to seize (and sell) his Cessna crop duster, his Bozeman,
Montana, home, and other equipment--to pay $389,000 in federal
taxes dating all the way back to the 1970s. Schweitzer's first
run-in came when he refused to pay $700 worth of taxes back in
1977; a business partner had to pay up in order to free $6,000 in
business accounts frozen by the IRS, which also audited
Schweitzer the following year. Not long after, Schweitzer became
a tax resister. He attended Posse Comitatus meetings and
according to the Associated Press had contacts with some members
of the neo-Nazi group, The Order, infamous for its string of
armored car robberies in the 1980s.

Schweitzer was a charismatic man who could inspire deep
affection. "He's one of the best-hearted people I've ever
known," his father-in-law, Edwin Hardesty, told a Billings
Gazette reporter well after Schweitzer's troubles with the law
had begun. "He's still a part of my family and we still love
him." As Schweitzer delved deeper into Posse and
constitutionalist ideology in the 1980s, his normal streak of
stubbornness turned to extremism. When he helped his friend
Bernard Kuennen's legal defense--Kuennen let his dog go around
unvaccinated--the two barraged the judge with questions on the
difference between "admiralty" and "common"
law ("sovereign citizens" believe that our court system
is an admiralty court system that has illegitimately expanded its
jurisdiction). Schweitzer defied policemen who stopped him for
traffic violations. When Schweitzer operated a crop-dusting
company in Washington, a state safety inspector appeared one day
at Schweitzer's airplane hangar for an inspection, and cited the
pilot for a minor electrical violation, explaining to Schweitzer
that it was intended to protect employees. Schweitzer, according
to a source familiar with him, fired his only employee right then
and there. "Now, there are no employees who work here, so
see how your regulations protected the man," Schweitzer is
reputed to have said. Schweitzer eventually sold his business and
moved to Montana, where he briefly went into a fireworks business
with his brother, then got into the tax problems that resulted
eventually in the loss of his plane in 1992.

Schweitzer found the ideal partner in Rodney Owen Skurdal, who
could add ruthlessness and determination to Schweitzer's own
persuasive stubbornness. Skurdal's qualities manifested
themselves in relentless manipulations of the legal system to
serve his own purposes, a skill that he developed to a fine art.
Skurdal, a native Montanan, joined the Marine Corps upon leaving
high school in 1971, spending nearly a decade in the service
until discharged in 1980. During his stint with the corps he
served in a security detail as a driver in a support unit,
attaining the rank of staff sergeant. After his discharge he
moved to Wyoming, where he very early demonstrated his skills as
a legal guerilla when he became involved in a workman's
compensation suit after being injured while working at an oil
rig. Skurdal, already under the influence of the Posse Comitatus,
claimed that the federal government lacked the authority to print
paper money and demanded to be paid in gold bullion. Acting as
his own attorney, Skurdal stretched the case out for over a year,
finally reaching the state supreme court, which dismissed the
suit as "perhaps the most frivolous appeal ever filed
here." A Wyoming newspaper claimed that U.S. District Court
documents from a lawsuit that never went to court showed that
witnesses testified that it was after the skull fracture he
sustained at the oil field in 1983 that he first became
preoccupied with "constitutional" issues. His former
wife, Susan Deleano, testified that after the injury he had
"an odd personality" and refused to use a social
security number or driver's license.

Skurdal moved back to Montana some time after 1988; in 1992 he
bought a log cabin near Roundup, Montana. According to some, he
was peaceful and quiet at first. "Rodney never yelled or got
upset," said a sheriff's deputy, "I think he could be
reasoned with. But I don't know what's come over him in the past
year." A former girlfriend described him as peaceful and
religious. "Rod doesn't have a mean streak in his
body," she said.

To others who knew Skurdal, especially the court officials who
had to deal with him on a regular basis, this description seemed
to be overly generous. Skurdal, as a "sovereign
citizen," believed that any virtually any government at all
meant enslavement. In a court document filed in Montana in 1994,
Skurdal offered the following as examples of "tyranny":
"A Social Security card/number, marriage licenses, drivers
licenses, insurance, vehicle registration, welfare from the
corporations, electrical inspections, permits to build your own
home, income taxes, property taxes..." Skurdal was also a
member of Christian Identity, and as such, openly racist,
claiming that non-whites were "beasts," and Jews the
children of Satan. His common law documents often contained
racist justifications, proclaiming the superiority of whites.
Skurdal's extreme political and religious beliefs were
intertwined and inseparable; his legal briefs were as likely to
refer to the Bible or to Identity teachings as they were to refer
to legal code. The Uniform Commercial Code simply became one more
religious text from which Skurdal could cite chapter and verse.

Skurdal's guerilla tactics at one point had simultaneous suits
on-going in every one of Montana's 56 counties; three times he
was able to get up to the Montana Supreme Court--over traffic
tickets. When the fed-up state judiciary finally decreed that
courts were to dismiss Skurdal's documents as frivolous unless
they were signed by a lawyer, Skurdal simply mailed his writs and
documents to out-of-state agencies, which--assuming they were
valid but mis-delivered--sent them back to Montana, where
unsuspecting officials filed them. Musselshell County Attorney
Vicki Knudsen spent nearly four years dealing with Skurdal's
various court cases over driving without a license, and his other
motions, before finally giving up her job in disgust. Skurdal,
among other documents, filed a "Citizens Declaration of
War," which condemned "foreign agents" within the
"country of Montana." He also filed a document accusing
county officials of attempting to bring in a New World Order. In
July 1994, Chief Justice Jean A. Turnage of the Montana Supreme
Court imposed a $1,000 sanction on Skurdal and limited his access
to the courts, calling his filings "not only nonsensical but
meritless, frivolous, vexatious and wasteful of the limited time
and resources of this court, of the clerk of this court and of
the various public officials and counsel that are forced to deal
with and respond to Mr. Skurdal's abuse."

Skurdal purchased a small farm near Roundup, Montana
(population 1,808), in Musselshell County, but his determination
not to pay taxes to the federal government did not take long to
cause problems. Skurdal's property was "seized" by the
IRS in 1993 and put up for sale for $29,000, but nobody quite had
the testicular reserves necessary to come and take it from
Skurdal, who continued to occupy the land. Musselshell Count
Sheriff G. Paul Smith was not about to make an issue of it, so
the land went into government possession, on paper at least. In
June 1994 the government again unsuccessfully tried to auction
the property. The following year, the IRS sued Skurdal in an
effort to get him to move--a singularly ineffective tactic.

In late 1994, Skurdal invited Schweitzer to move in with him;
in early 1995 the two were joined by Daniel Petersen. With the
two Freemen moved in, Rodney Skurdal's twenty-acre farm near
Roundup became a headquarters, the four-bedroom home a command
center. Computers, faxes, laser printers and shortwave radios
were willing electronic servants. Outside, the small ranch
sported a vegetable garden, a pool, a satellite dish, and a
swingset and basketball hoop. It also sported warning signs:
"Do Not Enter Private Land of the Sovereign...The right of
Personal Liberty is one of the fundamental rights guaranteed to
every citizen, and any unlawful interference with it may be
resisted."

What Schweitzer and Skurdal resorted to, a sort of
bureaucratic guerilla warfare, was neither new nor unique to
them. They represented merely the cutting edge of a rage against
government interference that was sweeping the country. Some
directed their rage at the federal government, and manifested
their anger in paramilitary militia groups; some directed their
anger at people whose skins were a different color. Many were, in
the words of Peter Finch, simply "mad as hell and not going
to take it anymore." What else could explain people like
Edwin G. Thrall of East Windsor, Connecticut? Thrall, a 76-year
old retired farmer and demolition contractor, waged a battle for
years against local government that culminated in an armed
standoff. An iconoclastic loner, he built a dance hall years ago
without ever bothering to get building or zoning permits. East
Windsor town officials would not let him open the hall to the
public; Thrall did so anyway, landing in jail several times in
the 1970s for violating injunctions. In 1979, he had a standoff
with police, shooting the tires of their cruisers; in 1995 he
held another one, a five-hour standoff with more than two dozen
police, after his property was taken by the town because he
refused to pay back taxes on it (in retaliation for the town's
refusal to let him use the dance hall). Thrall entered the
property, began to use heavy machinery to work on the roof of the
dance hall, and threatened police who tried to stop him with a
shotgun. Thrall called himself a "constitutionalist"
and "sovereign property owner." He didn't believe
anybody had any right to interfere with his property--including
to tax it.

Thrall was not a lone crank; far from it. In fact, across the
country, other "sovereign citizens" were taking up not
shotguns but pens--though still wielding these instruments
against the government. In the Ozarks, George Gordon operated the
George Gordon School of Common Law for anybody who might come and
learn how to file motions and papers. "You know, the guys at
Waco had a remedy," he mused. "they had the judicial
system. I sit here and expect a raid just because of the work I'm
in, but does that mean I'm going to start shooting at the
policeman? No! My solution is to go into court and defeat the
jackbooted thugs."

This was the strategy of Schweitzer and Skurdal as well. Not
only did they refuse to pay taxes or to vacate their land, but
they struck back, clogging the court system with frivolous suits.
"Once a court accepts one of these asinine Freemen
things," said Roundup resident and former county attorney
Vicki Knudsen, "it's in the system. Everybody named in it
becomes involved [and] has to respond. It's not funny. It's not
romantic. It's scary." Freemen in Garfield County generated
so many documents--and threats over filing them--that Court Clerk
and Recorder JoAnn Stanton lost forty pounds.

The Freemen didn't just issue phony suits, however; they also
tried to create phony money using complicated schemes involving
the filing of liens worth millions of dollars against various
Montana property owners or the U.S. or Montana governments. Until
they were found invalid, bank computers might list these liens as
assets. This in turn created a window during which banks might
transfer money against these assets. So Freemen would deposit
fake money orders in other banks, to be drawn upon the bank
listing the lien. The money orders, generally signed by
Schweitzer (Skurdal, Daniel Petersen and William Stanton also
signed the notes on occasion), looked real, except for small
details such as a lowercase "u" in "United
States." Bogus checks sometimes carried the words
"Certified Bankers Check -- Controller Warrant,"
instead of a bank name, along with account and lien numbers. Many
checks were drawn against a non-existent account in a Butte,
Montana, branch of the Norwest Bank. The checks stated that they
were also redeemable at the Office of the U.S. Postmaster. If the
Freemen withdrew the funds deposited before all parties realized
that there was no real money involved, they might get away with a
hefty sum. They didn't always succeed; Freeman Will Stanton got
caught in October 1994 when he wrote a hot check for $25,000 to
pay his taxes--these funds were drawn upon $3.8 million of assets
at Merrill Lynch which that company had discovered were no good.

The Freemen didn't just try to use the money orders
themselves; they also sold them, advertising them as a way for
people to get themselves out of debt. If you owed $20,000 in
mortgage payments, you could simply make out a bogus money order
to the amount, and your debts were gone. Or better yet, they
suggested, make the money order out for $40,000, then demand an
immediate refund of the "overpayment." They might well
write you a good check before they discover that the money order
they received was bad. As one "patriot" explained on
the Internet, "LeRoy Schweitzer does have their [sic] own
monetary system. When you attend their course on location, they
will issue you CHECKS times two (biblical) to pay off all IRS
debts and all loans to banks for no charge. They are having
success in this area, but it is hard fight [sic]." By April
1994 more than 100 banks across the country had reported receipt
of bogus money orders. Not all of these came from Schweitzer and
Skurdal; a good number of them came from Posse hotbed Tigerton,
Wisconsin. But the Montana Freemen contributed their fair share.
One of the more bizarre incidents in the Freemen saga came when
the mayor of Cascade, Montana, apparently a Freeman sympathizer,
actually deposited a bogus $20,000,000 in the town bank. Most
attempts to pass the checks involved considerably smaller
amounts; the Denver Business Journal in December 1995 reported
that 15 Schweitzer checks had been passed recently, ranging from
$2,600 to $91,000. Some people tried to use them to cheat their
ex-spouses, sending them as child support checks. For some time,
local bank officials and postmasters were puzzled, for although
they knew the checks were not valid, they had not at that point
heard of Leroy Schweitzer--the fake checks had been distributed
faster than the news of them had. Not until early 1996 were banks
generally aware of the nature of the bogus checks, and even then,
not all were. And ordinary people, many of whom received the
checks in return for selling cars, boats, or for services
rendered, had no knowledge whatsoever that the check or money
order they had just received was bad. "People see these and,
if you're a very unsuspecting person," an Omaha, Nebraska,
county treasurer explained, "they really do look
authentic."

Authorities were not sure what to do; they wanted to shut
Schweitzer and Skurdal down, but the Freemen made it abundantly
clear that if they were going to go down, they would go down
fighting. "These people want to be martyrs," Sheriff
Smith lamented. "I don't know how far they are willing to
carry that." And Smith, with only six men in his sheriff's
department, didn't want to lose any of his own men. People were
also slow to take action because the circumstances seemed so
unusual. Roundup, after all, was not simply a small town, it was
an intimate town. The same family operated the local car
dealership for over half a century. If people weren't related to
one another, then they certainly knew each other. The advent of
the Freemen sent shock waves through the community; the terror
hit home because it was so intimate. You couldn't lose yourself
in Roundup the way you could in New York City. If someone issued
a death threat against you, everybody around knew exactly where
you lived, where you worked, where you went to church. Similarly,
when Skurdal began to issue threats, he was not issuing them
against faceless officials, but against the friends and relatives
of people in town. Some people didn't have a problem with the
Freemen. "They wave. We wave," explained one neighbor.
"As long as you're not government, they won't bother
you." But for most others, life among the Freemen was not so
carefree. Once the Freemen came to town, Roundup began to change.
The County Courthouse started to lock its doors; the county
attorney purchased two new guns with which to protect himself.
"This was like Mayberry..." said deputy school
superintendent Kathy Fister, "This was like hometown
America." But now to many it had the markings of a Beirut
wrought in miniature.

FRICTIONS

The Freemen of Roundup--Schweitzer, Skurdal, Daniel Petersen
(and his wife Cherlynn)--were not the only Freemen. In Lewistown
a logger named Jay Brand railled against the government; at
Coffee Creek Ronald Fulbright and a group of several others,
active in Roy Schwasinger's "We the People"
organization, were indicted on federal charges of conspiring to
injure judges and attorneys in their bankruptcy case. And about
150 miles to the northeast, near Jordan, Montana, were another
group, equally radical. They were centered around the Clark
family--patriarch Ralph Clark and his brother Emmett, Emmett's
wife Rosie, his son Edwin, his nephew Richard and grandson Casey,
Richard's wife Kay--in Jordan, Montana, for whom the 1980s were a
troubling time. Not opposed to government interference, but
instead accepting nearly $700,000 in various kinds of government
handouts, through poor planning and overextending themselves with
land and machinery purchases, they became unable to cope with
their debts when hard times hit. Starting in 1981, the Clarks
stopped making payments on federal farm loans; according to the
county attorney, by 1995 they owed $1.8 million in missed
payments. The tight-nit Jordan community sometimes helped them
out; in the early 1990s his neighbors helped him plant crops so
he could avoid foreclosure. But the Clarks' inability to keep up
with their debts made them easy prey for the rhetoric of Roy
Schwasinger, Leroy Schweitzer, and other antigovernment
sharpsters. "This thing just kept building every time I
talked to them," lamented Ralph's and Emmett's brother
Alven. "They just listened to these prophets." But in
fact, as early as 1982, Ralph Clark told a Montana reporter that
the sheriff would need the National Guard to get him off his
ranch. In the 1990s they tried various schemes such as setting up
revocable trusts to try to avoid federal and state taxes.
Eventually, a bank foreclosed on the 960-acre wheat farm of Ralph
Clark, selling it at a sheriff's auction for $493,000. The Clarks
decided to set up their own court, a "common law"
court. In January 1994 three dozen Freemen took over Garfield
County's courthouse and held a meeting creating their own county
government. Present at the meeting were Rodney Skurdal and Daniel
Petersen, who had driven up from Roundup. Richard Clark was the
presiding judge. The makeshift court charged the real judge, as
well as various others whom the Clarks had felt persecuted them,
with contempt. "We've opened our own common law court and we
have the law back in the county now," Clark told the thirty
people who attended the meeting, which was even videotaped.

But setting up their own court was only the beginning of what
the Clark family had in mind, as Jordan's residents soon
discovered. Soon posters appeared, offering a bounty of one
million dollars for the arrest of Sheriff Charles Phipps, as well
as the county attorney and the judge. Bemused, Phipps asked a
Freeman if he could get the reward if he turned himself in. The
Freeman told him yes, but that he wouldn't live long enough to
enjoy it. He'd be "tried, convicted and hung."

Phipps was no longer amused, but his resources were limited.
He had a deputy and a tiny, two-cell jail, but little else.
Phipps was not only the sheriff but also the town coroner and
livestock inspector. Still, he arrested Freemen now and then,
when they wandered from their ranches and farms, charging them
with threatening public officials. He soon became aware that he
had a serious standoff on his hands; the Clarks were not going to
budge from their farm. In April 1994 Ralph Clark was ordered to
appear in court to face charges of solicitation of kidnapping,
while on the same day his farm was auctioned to settle the
$37,864 he owed in mortgage payments (on a $710,000 mortgage).
Clark defied the order to appear, so a warrant was issued for his
arrest, but there seemed little possibility of anybody going out
to the ranch to arrest him. The Freemen continued their
activities. In June 1994 they issued "subpoenas"
against Montana's two senators, its state supreme court justices,
and the district judge. The following month they mailed to 45
jurors who were to sit on a trial of five Freemen for
impersonating public officials letters that made threats against
them and their property if they convicted the Freemen.

"They've taken a stand," explained a fellow rancher
to a foreign reporter, "and now they are refusing to
negotiate. If you talk to them, tell them there is still room for
negotiation. It is a horrible situation. There is wrong on both
sides here." Not everybody thought the Clarks blameless;
some thought them lazy. But the Clarks' descent into the world of
the Freemen seemed to many Jordan residents to be a tragedy. Not
a few of them blamed outsiders like Leroy Schweitzer, who they
felt convinced the Clarks that they could keep their farm by
engaging in their common law tactics. "I think it started
out with everyone thinking it was a bit humorous," said
Lance Tonn, a laywer for the bank that foreclosed on the Clarks.
"But when you have someone about to suffer an economic loss,
as they are, and some who seem to have lost touch with reality,
you have a bad situation."

Local public officials chafed at their impotence. "They
know we know where they are," Garfield County Attorney Nick
Murnion complained in July 1995. "It's like they're saying,
'We're here, we have guns, and we know you're scared to come get
us.'" Sometimes they fantasized. "If somebody were to
take an Army tank up to Skurdal's," mused one, "Well,
why not? The IRS owns the place, so it wouldn't be like taking
his property." But the reality was that Army tanks were not
in the picture, and the Freemen were.

Local officials did ingeniously use what tools they had at
their disposal. After the Jordan Freemen posted their bounties
against the sheriff and other officials, Murnion filed charges
aginst fifteen of them for impersonating public officials.
Murnion was responsible for a developing a new weapon, when he
dug up an old law against "criminal syndicalism," a
crime defined as advocating violence or terrorism for political
purposes. Originally intended to be used against labor protests,
this felony, punishable by ten years in prison, seemed to be the
perfect response to the bounties and threats of hanging that the
Freemen routinely issued.

In February 1995 Murnion won his first conviction for
"criminal syndicalism," against 64-year old rancher
William Stanton. Stanton was in many ways a typical Freeman,
unable to cope with economic disaster. He had filed for
bankruptcy in 1988 and managed to make payments until 1993, when
he missed one and was hit with a foreclosure. Some neighbors
claimed gambling problems exacerbated his situation. LeRoy
Schweitzer offered Stanton a $3.8 million loan, which the banks
did not accept. But Stanton did not take his anger out on
Schweitzer; rather, he became more opposed to the federal
government. He became a full-fledged Freeman, as did his
family--his wife Agnes, his grown son Ebert, and Ebert's wife
Val, the latter two moving in from Billings to help Agnes run the
farm. "She became really preoccupied with it," said
Agnes' sister of Stanton's wife. "No matter what the
conversation was, it would always come back to common law or what
was wrong with the government." Stanton, as the Freemen's
"constable," had been the one to offer the $1 million
bounty for the various Garfield officials; he had also been the
one to tell Sheriff Phipps he'd be hung from a bridge.

However, Stanton's conviction, rather than cowing the Freemen,
instead resulted in one of the most serious and scary of the
Freemen's various escapades. The FBI first learned that something
might be up and tipped off Murnion and County Attorney John
Bohlmann of Musselshell that the Freemen might be planning
something against the two of them and the judge who tried
Stanton. According to Sheriff Smith, the tip said that the
Freemen were planning to kidnap a judge, try him in their court,
sentence him to hanging and videotape the proceeding. In
response, Musselshell County put reserve deputies in the
courthouse to protect District Judge Roy C. Rodeghiero and to
accompany him to and from work.

Then the day after Stanton was sentenced, on March 3, 1995, a
Musselshell County deputy stopped two Freemen, Dale Jacobi and
Frank Ellena, for not having license plates on their pickup. Nor
did they have a driver's license. The deputy asked the men to get
out of the pickup and discovered that both were carrying
concealed weapons without permits. Searching Ellena, deputies
discovered what was later revealed to be a hand-drawn map of
Jordan, with the office and home of Nick Murnion circled. In the
car, they found a considerable supply of guns and ammunition
(including bullets that could pierce body armor), 30 sets of
plastic-strip handcuffs, some $60,000 in gold and silver, about
$26,000 in cash, duct tape, a video camera, a 35mm Minolta
camera, and various pieces of radio telecommunications gear.
Deputies were sure they had come across part of the kidnapping
crew.

Later in the day, around 6pm (about an hour and a half after
Jacobi and Ellena were jailed), the two deputies at the Roundup
jail, Orville "Buzz" Jones and Mitchell
"Dutch" Van Syckel, dropped their jaws as three Freemen
walked into the jail and demanded the items seized from the car
of Jacobi and Ellena, which were in clear view to everybody in
the jail. These three were part of two carloads of Freemen, five
in all, who had driven to the jail, communicating by two-way
radios. One of the deputies noticed a concealed weapon on one of
the Freemen, made visible when a jacket opened. The deputies were
able to place the three Freemen under arrest on concealed weapons
charges. They then went outside to the vehicles, where two
freemen occupied one of the cars. One of them was talking into a
hand held two-way radio. As the deputies approached, the
passengers locked their doors and refused to exit the car. When
deputies saw guns on the persons of the Freemen, they broke open
a window and placed them under arrest. That night they learned
the identity of the Freemen and discovered to their surprise that
the group included a ringer: a thin man with a grey beard turned
out to be not a Freeman but none other than John Trochmann,
founder of the Militia of Montana, who lived clear on the other
side of the state. Trochmann had become infatuated with the
Freemen ideology and had praised them in his newsletter
"Taking Aim" (in fact, his wife Carolyn Trochmann was
even a featured speaker for the "American Sovereigns
Group"). Why Trochmann had decided to accompany the Freemen
on their fishing expedition the deputies could not figure out.
Clearly a complicated plan had been devised. "If this isn't
evidence that some type of evil intent was afoot, then I'm not a
very good policemen," Jones said. Jones could sympathize
with the economic plight that many of the Freemen were in, but
not their tactics. "My Grandpa lost his ranch during the
Depression..." he said. "I go by that ranch every day,
and I see the trees my Grandma planted, and I see where my dad
was born. And it just tears at my heart. God, I understand them
almost to the point that it scares me. But I do not tolerate
crimes of violence."

After the arrests of the Freemen and Trochmann, a second
assault began--this time on the phone lines, as the sheriff's
office was flooded with hundreds of calls, many of which
threatened violence. John Bohlman received at least forty
"straight-out death threats" against himself and his
secretary. Many of the phone calls were local, but others were
long-distance. Bohlman's secretary ended up moving her daughter
temporarily to Minnesota after one caller threatened the child. A
good many of the calls demanded that Trochmann be released, and
were clearly from Militia of Montana members or sympathizers.
M.O.M. co-founder Randy Trochmann issued a press release denying
any links between M.O.M. and the Freemen, claiming that Trochmann
had just travelled to Musselshell county to negotiate a
"settlement" between Freemen and local law enforcement
officers. Randy Trochmann had no convenient explanation for the
unusual activities of the Freemen that day.

Unfortunately for Roundup officials, they had to drop most of
the criminal charges against the Freemen, apparently because of
the way the searches were conducted. Only two concealed-weapons
violations stuck. Nick Murnion charged six more Freemen with
criminal syndicalism, for a written demand on a Justice of the
Peace that he show up at Rodney Skurdal's home and provide
various pieces of evidence, but of the six, only one was
arrested--Frank Ellena, who cooperated in court and got a bail
reduction that allowed him to post bail, after which he claimed
he had lied in order to escape an "evil trap." Both
Ellena and Jacobi jumped bail.

Incidents such as the kidnapping episode made law enforcement
officers in Roundup and Jordan all the more unwilling to provoke
drastic responses, but local opinion was less hesitant. People
resented the fact that they had to pay taxes and obey laws, but
the Freemen could flout those same requirements with apparent
impunity. "Call the IRS and ask them why they haven't seized
their property," demanded car dealer Brian Hoiland of
Roundup. "Why do they get special treatment? I think the
federal government has a responsibility to the people who are
paying taxes." Brian's brother Bruce, the fire chief,
agreed. "There's no reason in the world they don't go up
there, arrest them, clean it up and be done with it. What kind of
message does that send...? Not a good one." The Oklahoma
City bombing on April 19, 1995, helped to change some attitudes.
Montanans were less willing to tolerate the extreme
anti-government behavior of the Freemen.

But local officials wanted federal help, and that help seemed
unforthcoming. In early April 1995, John Bohlman wrote a letter
to President Bill Clinton himself, pleading for help, telling the
president that "personally, I believe we will have a
confrontation that ends in gunfire before the end of the
year." Many residents of Garfield and Musselshell Counties
were convinced that the FBI was at least keeping the Freemen
under surveillance--there were too many unfamiliar vehicles and
men in plaid shirts on the roads. But U.S. Attorney Sherry Scheel
Matteucci refused all comment on the subject of an investigation.
"All I can tell you is that it's our intention to enforce
the law," she said, "and I have absolute confidence
that it will be done."

Reporters covering the Freemen scene soon coined a term for
the reason behind the inactivity: "Weaver Fever." The
shootout and siege at Ruby Ridge in 1992, in which white
supremecist Randy Weaver's wife and son were killed, as well as a
federal marshal, had caused a severe backlash in the northwest
among right-wing extremists, helping to spawn the militia
movement in Montana and Idaho. The reporters might well have
added "Waco" to the term they invented, for the siege
of the Branch Davidian compound in 1993, with its fiery end, was
just as much a cause celebre among the extremist right. It also
aroused severe criticism of the federal government's methods from
the general public, too, stinging them where it hurt the most:
public relations. Consequently, after the hail of protest
following Waco, federal law enforcement agencies began to step
very gingerly indeed, as did their counterparts on the state
level.

But while nothing was done, the Freemen population grew--by
July 1995 the Skurdal cabin alone held six Freemen. In fact,
public officials began to suspect that the lack of action against
the Freemen was one factor in their growing numbers. "Their
argument about taxes spreads because they say, 'See, the
government knows that tax is voluntary and that's why they're not
prosecuting us,'" said John Bohlman. "The fact is that
Rodney has written documents that say if anybody comes on his
land, he'll kill them." In fact, Skurdal and Schweitzer
seemed completely in control of the situation, ignoring or
threatening public officials, while conducting their money order
scams with impunity. They treated the media--who had by 1995
become quite curious about the renegade anarchists--with disdain,
generally refusing interviews unless the newspaper or television
crew would agree to a $100 million lien as a bond to guarantee
fair treatment. If public officials were reluctant to engage with
the Freemen, the Freemen were themselves ready for a
confrontation. "This is a holy war," Rodney Skurdal
wrote in a document demanding the resignation of Sheriff Smith in
April 1995. "God's laws vs. man-made laws."

DEFIANCE

Although they presented a bold front to outsiders, among
themselves the Freemen must have argued about their security, for
in September 1995 Rodney Skurdal and Leroy Schweitzer decided to
pull up stakes and leave Roundup, to join the Clarks up in
Jordan. At night they and other Freemen launched a convoy of six
vehicles to travel the 120 miles between the two towns. Law
enforcement officers did not stop them.

Once the Freemen were united on the Clark ranch, the waiting
game--now narrowed down to one site--began again. At the ranch
were many of the most radical Freemen. As of November 1995, the
laundry list of charges against them was already voluminous: five
charged with threatening public officials, three charged with
impersonating public servants, one charged with solicitation of
kidnapping, one charged with obstructing a peace officer, six
charged with criminal syndicalism. Two were under investigation
(later charged) with armed robbery; Richard Clark was under
investigation (later charged) with theft of $70,000 worth of
grain that belonged to his son but which he would not let his son
remove from the property.

Sheriff Charles Phipps of Jordan, equipped with a two-cell
jailhouse for a town of almost 500 people, now had to deal with a
band of wanted men many times bigger than his miniscule sheriff's
department. He was in no hurry to do so. Assuring the occasional
inquiring reporter that something would be done eventually, he
was nevertheless reluctant to engage the well-armed Freemen in
any sort of serious confrontation. Moreover, the war with the
Freemen put a tremendous strain on local government budgets.
"Even the trials we've gone through are almost more than our
little counties can bear," said Carol Hellyer, the office
manager for Sheriff Phipps. "We run on pretty tight
pennies." State officials were just as reluctant. "They
are the last on the list of problems we have had to deal
with," said Montana's attorney general, Joseph P. Mazurek,
in September. "We'll do everything we can not to put
officers or others in harm's way. In some respects, the public's
patience has been tried, but law enforcement has erred on the
side of making arrests without causing violent
confrontations." Federal officials too spoke only of biding
their time. "I think federal law enforcement has always been
very reluctant to go knocking down doors," U.S. Attorney
Sherry Matteucci explained. "Law enforcement by its nature
requires considered, planned, cautious action that is based on
probable cause of evidence. It takes time to do it right and
that's what we want to do." In November, Nick Murnion and
John Bohlmann even testified to Congress about Freemen
activities. "I believe this group has declared war on our
form of government," Murnion said. "They are in open
insurrection."

In the meantime, the Freemen group had their own miniature
kingdom to run. The Clark farm, with its cluster of buildings,
became the new headquarters for the seminars of Schweitzer and
Skurdal. It was no longer a farm anymore, but "Justus
Township," with its own laws, court, and officials. Ralph
Clark was the "marshal" of Justus, others served on its
court.

The seminars became the main activity at Justus. Ostensibly
free, people had to pay a certain fee to guarantee that they
would show up. The Freemen would take their willing pupils in
groups of 25, for a week's worth of tutelage, while the students
took notes and videotaped the talks. At one point, Freemen
claimed that people from 46 different states had attended their
seminars. "We are the new Federal Reserve," Schweitzer
assured a group of students at one seminar, "We are
competing with the Federal Reserve--and we have every authority
to do it." The Freemen had little interest in people who
were not interested in the seminars, and continued their
hate-hate relationship with the press, in November 1995 going so
far as to confiscate at gunpoint $66,000 worth of equipment from
a not particularly bright ABC television crew. A Polish
journalist claimed to have been run off by the Freemen. The
Freemen also lashed out at others who annoyed them, such as
Pastor Jerry Walters of Zion Lutheran Church in Roundup, who
received a lien of $100 billion from Rodney Skurdal.
Walters--whose Zion assignment was his first after
seminary--quickly ran afoul of Skurdal after his arrival in
Roundup, when he proved unreceptive to Skurdal's Christian
Identity beliefs. The Freemen, reasonably well-armed with rifles
and shotguns and a large quantity of ammunition, tried to build a
real arsenal, contracting with a Montana arms dealer for $1.4
million worth of guns. Unfortunately for the Freemen, though
perhaps happily for the citizens of Jordan, they tried to pay for
the arms with one of Schweitzer's bogus money orders, and the
deal fell through.

Ensconsed in their hideaway, the Freemen became increasingly
isolated, generally seeing only seminar visitors and friends who
brought them supplies. Their former relations with the Montana
Militia soured over time, and the Freemen eventually even put a
bounty on the head of John Trochmann. The M.O.M. decided that,
whatever the lure of the Freemen philosophy, Schweitzer and
Skurdal were too flaky to support. Moreover, the existence of the
Freemen seemed to threaten the dominance that M.O.M. sought over
the patriot movement in the state. "They were given an
opportunity to solve it peacefully," said M.O.M. leader
Randy Trochmann. "We've pretty much washed our hands of
them."

But if the Freemen no longer appealed to the Trochmanns, they
did attract others, people who made the pilgrimage to the Clark
compound and stayed. One early Freeman was Dale Jacobi, an
ex-police officer from Canada. Many were fugitives from the law.
Dana Dudley and Russell D. Landers, of North Carolina but more
lately from Colorado, fled the latter state where they were to be
tried on charges of conspiracy and securities fraud; they brought
16-year old Ashley Taylor with them. Montana seemed a likely
haven for them; so too for Steven Hance and his sons John and
James, who faced charges in North Carolina of assaulting a police
officer with deadly force and resisting arrest. Elwin Ward
brought his wife Tammy and two children to the Clark ranch; the
Wards were on the run from child-welfare officials in Michigan.
At least for a time, John Patrick McGuire, a former felon, was on
the ranch; McGuire was later arrested in Wyoming and extradited
to California on various charges. Others were locals, such as the
Stantons--William's wife, Agnes, his son and daughter-in-law,
Ebert and Val, and his granddaughter Mariah, only five. From a
distance, other sympathizers praised the Freemen for actually
having the guts to set up "common law" courts and act
on their beliefs. "Yes, there is a remedy!" one
"patriot" publication announced. "Re-establish the
common-law court in your county lawfully. Through the hard work
and research of Leroy Schweitzer, Rod Skurdal, Dan Peterson,
Richard Clark and many others, they found that the other side
left us a remedy intended only for them, hidden in the footnotes
and punctuation of their secret codes and statutes."

The people of Jordan, though not of one opinion, generally
viewed the Freemen with a mixture of distaste, distrust and fear.
Few liked the wanted posters the Freemen put up, or the threats
they made; others didn't like the fact that the Freemen could get
away with not paying taxes. Some began to call them "the
Freeloaders." Alice Fogle, a waitress at QD's Restaurant,
summed up the views of many when she labeled them "just a
bunch of losers." Civil rights advocates, such as the
Montana Human Rights Network, were even less complimentary,
chastising law enforcement officers for taking no action.

DISTRIBUTION

Though Schweitzer, Skurdal and the other Freemen were by now
committed to staying holed up in their farm buildings, there was
nothing stopping the flow of fake checks and money orders. As
more people attended the Schweitzer seminars and came away with
the knowledge of how to pass bogus financial instruments, checks
with Schweitzer's name on them spread across the entire country.
Banks everywhere learned--sometimes the hard way--what a Norwest
bank check might mean.

Usually, efforts to pass the bogus checks were not successful.
When Joseph Yacapraro of Coshocton, Ohio, tried to pay a car loan
with a $75,000 Schweitzer check, the bank refused to accept it
and Yacapraro's truck was ordered repossessed. But Yacapraro was
simply the tip of the iceberg. In San Diego the representative of
an auto credit company admitted to getting such bogus checks one
every ten days. Attempts to pass the phony money against private
individuals were often more successful. One person bilked was
Jason Mayhew of Texas, who sold his car to someone with a
Schweitzer check for $17,000. Mayhew was able to get his car
back, but others were not so lucky. In fact, Allan Kramer, the
man who unsuccessfully tried to get Mayhew's car, had passed
$500,000 in bogus money orders to get seven cars, four homes, a
boat and a condo in Hawaii.

Sometimes the checks were used not to get money or to get out
of a payment, but simply to make a point. In Ohio, common law
court adherent Larry Russell appointed himself a notary public
and offered a $1 million check from Norwest as a "bond"
to back it up. Russell's friend and common law court judge Bill
Ellwood called Schweitzer "probably the most knowledgeable
fellow in the country on the common law."

But if Schweitzer and Skurdal perfected the bogus money order,
it was M. Elizabeth Broderick of Palmdale, California, who turned
the scheme into an assembly line. A student of Schweitzer (she
called him "a great American") who surpassed the
master, Broderick was a Canadian native who moved to the United
States in 1967. After being convicted of operating a pyramid
scheme in Colorado, she moved to California and eventually began
holding seminars in October 1995 in which she taught the
distribution of bogus checks. Her seminars, which cost $125
merely to attend, often had over 300 participants at a time; her
staff alone numbered around thirty people. "It's based on
common law and God's laws," explained one Broderick
supporter. "A sheriff in full dress uniform came in and said
everything was true." Federal officials claimed that
Broderick had written more than $30 million worth of fraudulent
checks; later still, the figure was revised upward to over $100
million.

Broderick herself was a supremely self-confident woman (she
regularly wore a button which read "Lien Queen"), with
an ego to match. To her students, she claimed that the checks had
a fifty percent acceptance rate. To one reporter in early 1996
she claimed that she was the person responsible for the infamous
bankruptcy of Orange County, California, because of the liens she
placed on it. "I told the county attorney a year before they
went into bankruptcy that I would taken them into bankruptcy if
they didn't give me my property back," she said. "The
treasurer is just a scapegoat." Orange County, she claimed,
owed her $180 million because a judge there illegally authorized
a search of her home; when the government did not respond to this
claim, she declared it in default, then tried to put the $180
million in a bank. It refused, so she put a $100 million lien on
the bank. Of such stuff paper fortunes are made. Broderick
estimated she had liens worth $1.18 billion against California,
against which she would generously let participants in her
seminars write checks and comptroller warrants. She also, just to
make sure, had liens on the federal government. "Many, many
mortgages, many many car loans have been paid off," she told
one reporter. "And I'm proud to say that it works as long as
the feds don't get in the way. That's the only problem." But
the feds rarely seemed to interfere with Broderick, who kept
turning out graduates of her seminars. Many of them were simply
desperate people looking for some way to avoid crushing debts.
"It's hard to believe," said one attendee whose parents
were losing their home, "but might as well take the
chance."

The uses to which people put the money orders were varied.
Some, duped by Schweitzer, Broderick or others, clearly believed
that the money orders were valid and used them in good faith. The
majority were well aware that the money orders were invalid and
simply used them as a way to try to get out of debt or to get
some quick cash--or both. Typical of many such schemes was that
hatched by Brigham Parley Evans of West Valley City, Utah, who
owed the Wheeler Machinery Company of Salt Lake City close to
$10,000 for tractor repairs. The company eventually took Evans to
court and received a default judgment. Evans sent Wheeler a bogus
check for $19,964--twice the amount that was owed--and demanded a
refund for the overpayment, threatening to charge Wheeler 18%
interest if it were not paid promptly. The company obligingly
sent Evans a check for $9,982, which he cashed. When Wheeler
Machinery tried to deposit its check from Evans, the bank
rejected it as non-negotiable. In Arizona, Steven Gehring tried
to use a $250,000 money order as a bond for bail for a militia
member charged with child molestation. Gila County, Arizona,
discovering that the money order was signed by Schweitzer,
contacted Mussellshell County and told John Bohlman that they
would send warrants up for Schweitzer's arrest. Bohlman was
amused, telling them, "Why don't you send the officers, too,
because that's about the only way you'll get some action."

Estimates of the total amount of money "created" in
the form of the bogus money orders varied widely, up to $150
million. Regardless of the total amount, their effect was
enormous. "It's like throwing a hand grenade into the
financial workings of America," said an assistant U.S.
attorney in Dallas, Texas. Schweitzer and Skurdal, as
incommunicative as ever, were unwilling to comment on the effect
of their actions, but others who manufactured phony money orders
were. James Ramsden of the Tigerton, Wisconsin, group Family Farm
Preservation said the checks were a way to "wake up"
the citizenry about the illegitimacy of the Federal Reserve
system. "They should realize they are contributing to the
problem," he explained. "Why don't they go to the
Treasury of the United States and demand treasury money backed by
gold and silver? But no, they cry like little babies."
Family Farm Preservation was not the only group to compete with
Schweitzer and Broderick in the creation of bogus money orders
and checks. In Oregon, Kathleen Cottam, Robert Young and Robert
Moore wrote "comptroller warrants" for huge amounts.
But whether they passed checks signed by Schweitzer or someone
else, the underlying reasons were still the same: these
"patriots" viewed themselves as fighting a war against
the government, with paper weapons. "This is perfectly
legal," explained an adherent from Kansas City.
"They're just getting scared because we are winning."

STANDOFF

But in the early spring of 1996, the Freemen's world turned
upside down. The day began innocently enough, as LeRoy Schweitzer
and Daniel Peterson went out to inspect the site of a ham radio
antenna they were having set up to facilitate their
communications. The site, on the Clark ranch but some distance
from the building complex on the ranch, seemed a good place for a
tower. An installation crew had already brought much of the
equipment, but the installer asked the Freemen to come out for a
final inspection. However, when the Freemen arrived at the site,
they discovered to their dismay that the installer they had known
for some time was actually an undercover agent, and that the ham
antenna was part of an elaborate ruse to lure the Freemen leaders
from their compound. The FBI also arrested a third man, Lavon
Hanson, on charges of conspiring to defraud financial
institutions--Hanson was involved as a "courier" in a
complicated scheme developed by Schweitzer to buy goods with
counterfeit funds and sell them for profit.

Though the two freemen were armed, there was no struggle or
violence. Schweitzer and Peterson saved their energy for the
following day, when they were brought into a heavily guarded
federal courtroom to be arraigned. They shouted down the judge
and other members of the court, yelling that the court had no
jurisdiction over them and that they did not have to listen to
it. The Freemen called for a change of venue to
"Justus." The judge finally abandoned the arraignment
attempt, and had the court give them written copies of the
arraignment while calling for a new attempt to take place with
the Freemen watching the proceedings in another room. The
surprised reporters and other courtroom audience members
discovered what veteran observers of the common law movement had
known for some time: every courtroom encounter with a
"sovereign citizen" or "freeman" had the
potential for elaborate courtroom theatrics. To "sovereign
citizens," the court system was an illegimate
"admiralty" creation, no more valid than a three dollar
bill printed in Mad Magazine. When brought to court, sovereign
citizens often treated the courtroom as a rescued cult member
might treat his or her family: with a great deal of kicking and
screaming. As Soldier of Fortune Writer Jim Page--who had spent
time with the Freemen--noted, their fanaticism was like a holy
war. "Their political philosophy is based on their religious
philosophy," he explained. "And in that respect, they
are very similar to the young man who was just convicted of
murdering the prime minister of Israel. They're similar in the
depth of their convictions to Hamas." That the Freemen could
instill considerable fear could be seen in the actions of County
Attorney John Bohlman, who when he heard of the FBI move on the
Freemen decided to remove himself and his two small children from
his Roundup, Montana, home, fearing Freeman vengeance for the
capture of Schweitzer and Skurdal. Indeed, CB scanners picked up
reports suggesting that Freemen would come into Roundup to kill
people, although none in fact did.

The feds acted on two sets of federal indictments against the
Freemen, both issued in 1995, although many Freemen were wanted
on various state charges as well. The first indictment came from
a Montana grand jury in May 1995, which charged Schweitzer,
Peterson, Skurdal, and Richard and Emmett Clark with: conspiracy
to impede government function; conspiracy to prevent by force,
intimidation or threats the official duties of U.S. District
Judge Jack Shanstrom, U.S. Court Clerk Lou Aleksich, and Garfield
Count Sheriff Phipps; threats to assault, kidnap and murder
Shanstrom; and mailing a threatening communication to Shanstrom.
A second Montana grand jury, in December 1995, issued another
indictment naming the above five and seven more--John McGuire,
Cherlyn Bronson Petersen, Agnes Bollinger Stanton, William
Stanton, Ebert Stanton, Ralph Clark and Dale Jacobi--with 51
counts of conspiracy to defraud and to obtain money through false
pretenses, plus interfering with commerce (for hijacking
television camera equipment). McGuire, apprehended out of state,
and Stanton, still behind bars, were not in the compound.

With Schweitzer and Peterson behind bars, authorities moved
against the remaining Freemen, surrounding the Clark farm. The
FBI, however, was taking great pains to insure that what happened
was not a repeat of the notorious 1992 standoff at Ruby Ridge,
Idaho. FBI Director Louis Freeh consciously decided to eschew
earlier military-style tactics. Indeed, the desire to avoid a
confrontation appeared to be what made authorities wait nearly
two years before taking overt action. The FBI had been gathering
information for months, perfecting its case against the Freemen,
but was in no hurry actually to apprehend them. During all this
time, of course, the Freemen were openly running their fraudulent
schemes and threatening public officials like Nick Murnion, who
had at the time of the capture of Scheitzer and Petersen been
calling for federal assistance for over six months. The dealy
even became a political issue, as Democratic candidate for
governor Chet Blaylock announced that "arrests for
lawlessness should not be unreasonably delayed."

In fact it appears that local frustration with the lack of
progress in dealing with the Freemen played a role in the FBI's
decision to make its move. One of the last straws for local
residents was the Freemen's brazen action, in early March, of
publishing a "public notice" in local newspapers which
announced that the Freemen would take control of large swaths of
land in northeastern Montana, including Bureau of Land Management
property, state grazing lands, and lands that were privately
owned. The notice announced that people who trespassed on the
Freemen's new land would be arrested and punished. Such a move
outraged the neighbors of the Freemen. "So if dad was out
feeding his cows," explained the son of a rancher who leased
grazing land from the state, "to them he'd be trespassing on
their so-called land, and they'd take him to their court. And
from there your imagination could run rampant...Maybe they
wouldn't do anything, but who knows. Dad was really upset; up
until that time, all their threats had been against government
officials. Now they were disrupting our lives." County
voters had scheduled a meeting to discuss moving against the
Freemen by cutting their telephones and closing the county road
near the farms, which perhaps helped to spur the FBI to action.
However, Schweitzer himself, at a meeting at the Freemen's
compound on Sunday, the day before the arrest, outlined a scheme
to kidnap local government officials. At the meeting, which was
videotaped, Schweitzer explained that "We'll travel in units
of about 10 outfits, four men to an outfit, most of them with
automatic weapons, whatever else we got--shotguns, you name
it...We're going to have a standing order: Anyone obstructing
justice, the order is shoot to kill." With both sides making
preparations for a conflict, the time seemed propitious for the
FBI finally to step in.

Belated though the intervention was, it was welcomed by the
people of Jordan, who were mightily relieved that after all those
months, something was finally being done. After Schweitzer's
arrest a local bank hung up a sign that read "Goodbye,
LeRoy. Hello, FBI." Local resident K. L. Bliss said that he
used to farm near the Clarks, and that "everybody had
planted by June--but [Clark] had weeds this high. He's never made
a bank payment since 1981, he's never paid taxes since 1981--and
he's whining about the government." Some Montanans were
considerably more irate. "I want to see blood!" the
Associated Press reported one local resident shouting, "I've
lived with this for two years, and it's ruining my life. I want
it over." The unnamed resident was probably Alven Clark,
whose two brothers were on the Clark farm. Ranch hand Terry
Kastner called the Freemen "brainwashed," and wished
that "they'd go in there and shoot 'em all. It would save
the taxpayers a lot of money and time." Tom Fogle, a county
worker, was even more forceful. "If they can't get them out
of there peacefully in a couple of weeks, I'd say go in and get
them out any way they can. If they don't give up, I say go in and
strafe 'em...Bring in the Apache helicopters and blow the hell
out of them. I'm tired of it."

However, there were no "jack-booted" thugs appearing
outside the Clark farm. Although over a hundred federal, state
and local law enforcement agents converged on the Montana
hideout, conspicuously absent were camouflage or black uniforms.
Instead, agents wore civilian clothes and did not ride in armored
personnel carriers. Instead of only the FBI's quasi-military
Hostage Rescue Team, the agents in Montana included behavioral
specialists and trained negotiators. Instead of FBI snipers,
authorities installed video surveillance cameras on a microwave
tower overlooking the main road leading to the farm. The FBI was
aided in this by the fact that the Freemen compound was in an
area of high visibility, unlike the heavily wooded area that had
surrounded Randy Weaver's cabin at Ruby Ridge. The FBI also had
extensive eavesdropping equipment, some of which had been in
operation for months. Managing the situation was the FBI's
Critical Incident Response Group, which sought to fix three
problem areas that plagued the agency at Ruby Ridge and Waco: not
enough agents to handle extended standoffs, a lack of
coordination between tactical agents and hostage negotiators, and
confused lines of authority. Indeed, so many FBI personnel
appeared in the area that they took up all the hotel rooms in
Jordan, causing the army of reporters and journalists to engage
in a mad scurry for apartments, mobile homes, and hotel rooms in
other communities. Heading up the FBI was Robert "Bear"
Bryant, an assistant FBI director who in 1988 participated in the
Marion, Utah, siege of a group of armed religious zealots (which
had no loss of life). An NBC spokesperson said that the role
played by Dennis Franz in the television show "NYPD
Blue" was based on Bryant.

Six of the "Justus Townships" residents voluntarily
left the ranch after the arrests of Schweitzer and Peterson,
leaving about twenty Freemen behind, including several children.
Police blocked media access to the farm, allegedly fearing
violence against journalists. The crowd of law enforcement
officials established an operations center at a county
fairgrounds in Jordan, population 450, the seat of Garfield
County. The operations center had vehicles, command post
trailers, and even an airstrip. Phone lines to the farm were cut,
except for a line set up by the FBI for family members of those
on the farm.

Although few expected the Freemen to surrender immediately,
authorities soon went to work trying to convince the Freemen to
come out peacefully. On Tuesday, agents broadcast a television
appeal, in which U.S. Attorney Sherry Matteucci promised that
there would be no violence or harm done to them. "All of us
very much want this situation to be resolved peacefully,"
she said. "I urge them to come in and talk with me, talk
with lawyers, talk with whomever they feel comfortable about this
situation. We absolutely intend no harm to the persons who are on
the current property. I assure them that we are doing everything
possible to make certain that a dangerous situation does not
develop up here." Also appealing to the Freemen was Sheriff
Phipps, who was noticeably more considerate of their safety than
they had been of his own. The Freemen were unresponsive.

As many had suspected would be the case, a standoff developed.
With the Freemen not only unwilling to surrender, but reluctant
to negotiate, there was little hope for an early resolution to
the situation; the standoff was likely to become a siege. But the
FBI was unwilling to repeat the 1993 Davidian siege. There would
be no tight blockade, no high pressure tactics. They established
no boundary or perimeter around the Freemen, instead settling for
roadblocks in the area. The permeability of the dragnet was
demonstrated by intrepid reporters who skipped by FBI and Montana
Highway Patrol checkpoints to get up to the Clark farm for a
look-see. At least one camera crew working for NBC, exhibiting
more intestinal fortitude than intelligence, had their camera
equipment confiscated on Wednesday by patrolling Freemen. FBI
agents questioned people driving to or from the farm, but
generally did not stop them. People travelling through the area
were halted and asked to complete a form informing them that they
were nearing an area "which is considered extremely
dangerous due to the presence of persons charged with federal and
state crimes" and explaining that people aiding the Freemen
could be considered as "accessories after the fact." On
Thursday the Freemen themselves blocked the county road in front
of their farm with a barbed wire barricade.

Indeed, the siege was more of an embargo than a blockade; the
authorities were generally more willing to let outsiders approach
the farm than the Freemen were to let them in. The FBI discovered
it was difficult even to communicate with the people in the
compound, who refused to acknowledge the authority of the federal
government. "We are continuing our efforts to talk with the
people on the ranch," said FBI agent Tom Ernst to a French
reporter on Thursday. Amazingly, Ernst added that he "would
not characterize it as a standoff."

In a related action far away from the standoff in frigid
Montana, FBI agents in southern California served search warrants
on the Essex House Hotel, situated in Lancaster, fifty miles
north of Los Angeles, to search two hotel rooms and one meeting
area. The target of the raids was none other than Elizabeth
Broderick, Schweitzer's apt pupil. Broderick ran her two-day
seminars out of the Essex House. Agents carted boxes of computer
records and equipment out of her hotel rooms, and also raided her
home. On Wednesday, March 27, federal attorneys in Los Angeles
filed a complaint against Broderick and nearly two dozen
accomplices, in order to bar her from issuing her bogus checks
and money orders. Broderick denied that the federal government
had any authority over her.

The initial reaction from the so-called "patriot"
movement to the move on the Montana Freemen was mixed. Many
militia and common law court members spoke out in favor of the
Freeman, predictably comparing their situation to that of Randy
Waever or the Branch Davidians. Some claimed that the action
would be the first step in a federal clamp-down on the patriot
movement, and predicted future violence or even civil war.
Others, realizing the adverse publicity that the Montana Freemen
had been garnering, were considerably more cautious. The
Tri-States Militia, a loose umbrella group of militia units in a
number of states, issued a "press release" condemning
the actions of the Freemen, stating that they find it
"insulting and offensive that people who call themselves
members of the patriot community have combined their 'patriotic'
activities with a clear attempt to defraud banking institutions
and individual citizens through the use of phoney [sic] and/or
money orders coupled with force and threats." The Tri-States
contrasted the Freemen with their own, ostensibly
"constitutional" militias. The effectiveness of the
Tri-States call was considerably reduced in subsequent weeks,
when it was revealed during the trial of militiaman Ray Lampley
in Oklahoma on conspiracy charges that John Parsons, the head of
the Tri-States, was in the pay of the FBI. But in fact, the FBI
had taken pains to notify a number of militia groups across the
country of imminent action against the Freemen, presumably to try
to forestall any rash actions on the part of the paranoid
paramilitary groups.

The Militia of Montana, not only the militia closest
geographically to the Freemen but also one of the most prominent
of the paramilitary groups, initially acted very cautiously,
feeling its way through the webs of public opinion. The
Trochmanns told reporters that they sent representatives to the
scene to "monitor" the situation and to try to talk to
Freeman Dale Jacobi, who used to own a business near M.O.M.'s
Noxon, Montana, headquarters. The group issued a press release
telling other militias to "stand down" and not head to
Montana. John Trochmann even went so far as to praise the FBI:
"I think the FBI has been handling it very patiently. I
admire them for their patience. And they've had a tremendous
amount of pressure from the public, from the local law
enforcement, and from their superiors in the FBI and the justice
department. I think they're caught between a rock and a hard
place, and they're doing the only thing they can do."

However, not all M.O.M. members were as cautious as the
Trochmanns. Militiaman Ed Dosh called the Freemen "good
people," and suggested that "If somebody wants to
travel from Billings to Denver, I might tell them one way, you
might tell them another. It's just different routes to the same
goal. Our views differ on methodology." When Steve McNeil
heard about the siege of the Freemen, he decided to lead a
militia caravan to Jordan. Later, McNeil was arrested for showing
up at the courtroom where Schweitzer and Peterson were arraigned;
another judge had earlier made staying at home a condition of
McNeil's release. Had McNeil managed to get his caravan going, he
might have met with a rough reception, because a group of 30
local ranchers formed a posse to stand up to the militias and
support the FBI, patrolling the area in their own vehicles,
waiting for the militia to show up. "The militias will just
pump more hot air into the Freemen, and make it worse,"
explained a local farmer, Cecil Weeding. "There will be a
clash if they get here. This country is sick and tired of that
thing up there, and wants to get it over." But the sheriff's
office received telephone threats from militia groups across the
country.

Indeed, some prominent militia figures were considerably more
eager to support the Freemen, while others, though paying lip
service to the fact that the Freemen were wanted for many crimes,
expressed concern about their possible treatment at the hands of
federal authorities. The militia leader under whom the largest
fire was lit was Norm Olson, former commander of the Michigan
Militia, the largest of the militia groups in the country. Olson
had at times expressed ideas nearly identical to those of the
Freemen, but perhaps more importantly, the siege at Jordan
offered the militia leader another chance to grab the spotlight,
which had been denied him since his ouster from leadership after
he claimed that the Japanese were responsible for the Oklahoma
City bombing. Olson issued a press release accusing the
government of planning the premeditated murder of the Freemen,
along with the complicity of the media. He called for militia
units around the country to converge on Montana as quickly as
possible, and hinted that he himself might show up there. Later
he confirmed his intentions by issuing plans for an
"Operation Certain Venture." Olson received support for
this call to action by the Alabama-based Gadsden Minutemen, led
by Jeff Randall. Randall issued his own rallying plea, noting
that he needed "dedicated volunteers," but advised them
that "arrest is possible, and the FBI could very well decide
to shoot unarmed civilians." Minuteman founder Mike Kemp
made dire predictions, asserting that "there won't be
another Waco unanswered. They are pushing us to a confrontation.
If the shooting starts, it could get very ugly, very
quickly." Kemp argued that there was no reason to use armed
force against the Freemen, who, he asserted, only owed debts.
"It's a civil matter," he said, ignoring the charges of
armed robbery and assaulting a police officer with a deadly
weapon that have been lodged against some of those holed up on
the Clark farm, as well as the state charges.

Operation Certain Venture, according to Olson and Randall,
would consist of an unarmed convoy of food, mail and other
supplies ("women's necessities," explained Olson) to
the Montana Freemen. Olson suggested that April 19, the
anniversary of Waco and the Oklahoma City bombing, might be a
possible day for the convoy to set out, and compared the proposed
convoy to "a Normandy invasion, a landing on the
beach." Indeed, the siege stirred up visions of apocalypse
for the militia leader, whose predictions had become increasingly
dire since his ouster, including one during a Detroit radio talk
show in early March in which he predicted that a civil war would
occur in six to eight weeks. Speaking on the CBS show "Face
the Nation" about his plans to go to Montana, Olson said
that "if this is going to be the place where the second
American revolution finally culminates in war, then it's good for
a battlefield commander to be there to look at the logistics, to
look at the needs, and to find out exactly what the situation is
on the ground."

Other "patriot" figures offered differing opinions.
Gerry Spence, Randy Weaver's lawyer, complimented the FBI for its
restraint. Bo Gritz, the patriot leader who helped to negotiate
the surrender of Randy Weaver, appeared to be positioning himself
for another intervention, suggesting that "the longer these
people stay within those walls, the more determined they
get," and even condoning the use of armed force against them
if necessary. In Idaho, United States Militia Association leader
Samuel Sherwood called the Freemen charlatans and rogues.
"We've told everybody to stay away," he told a
reporter. "These people aren't what they are purporting to
be. They are not the innocent victims of oppression."
However, members of the "Freemen Patriots," a splinter
group at Gritz's patriot commune at Kamiah, Idaho, more radical
than their leader, expressed sympathy for the Montana Freemen and
claimed that the standoff at Jordan was simply a trap, with the
Freemen as bait to catch more members of the patriot movement.
They also suggested that U.S. Army Special Forces or other
military units had been deployed. The Patriots, led by Ed
LeStage, Chad Erickson, Pat Johnson and Michael Cain, announced
plans to hold a protest rally at Lewistown, Montana on April 1st,
to support the Freemen, and called for all supporters to show up
with white ribbons on their car or truck antennas. "We
support the God-given right of our Freemen Brothers at Jordan,
Montana, to be heard in a righteous constitutional court of
law," their call to action read. The Freemen Patriots, who
had criticized Gritz for inaction, seemed to find the Montana
Freemen more to their liking. Their ability to command support,
however, was virtually nil. On April 1st, only a bare handful of
people showed up at Lewistown as commanded. Lewistown assistant
police chief Bob Long described the scene as "five or six
guys out there at a RV park south of town. Right now, there are
more newspeople in town than freemen." LeStage explained to
reporters that they were in the "early stages of a long
rally here," and that he expected 800 people to show up by
the end of the week. However, numbers dwindled rather than grew,
leading one wag to suggest that they were being called
"three men" instead of "freemen."

Meanwhile, judicial proceedings continued against the two
captured Freemen. In court on Thursday, March 29, Daniel Petersen
and LeRoy Schweitzer sat quietly while Judge Richard Anderson
read the indictment to them, but when asked to enter pleas,
Peterson burst out that he wanted "you to be an honest
person and the rest of these perverts to be honest people."
Petersen was taken to a holding cell to watch the proceedings;
Anderson entered "not guilty" pleas on their behalf.

Over the weekend, initiative seemed temporarily to shift to
local officials and family members of the fugitives. Some, like
Steve Mangum, a truck driver from Salt Lake City, had traveled
long distances to try to reach the compound. Mangum's former
wife, Gloria and his daughter Jaylynn were among the Freemen. FBI
agents warned him not to try to enter the compound, and Mangum
agreed. He was, however, concerned about the fate of his dauther,
whom, he told reporters, "was taught to hate blacks, taught
to hate policemen, [and that] school was evil." Democratic
United States Senator Max Baucus (of Montana) argued that the
best way to resolve the conflict was to let the local residents
do it, along with the aid of family members.

Despite all the frictions over the past months, there was
still good reason to think that this strategy might work. After
all, in a small community like Jordan, family ties connected the
Clark farm fugitives with many people in town. Only two years
earlier, Jordan residents had raised $125,000 for a brain tumor
operation for Casey Clark. Many families were split by the
actions of the Freemen. While Ebert Stanton, his wife Val, and
their 5-year old daughter Mariah patrolled the Clark farm
perimeter, staring at them from the other side was Tom Stanton,
the farmer who had organized a 25 man posse to storm the Freemen
stronghold, before the FBI intervened. Jordan residents
circulated a petition to be presented to the Freemen, urging them
to come out and guaranteeing they would get a fair trial:
"The following friends, neighbors and relatives urge you to
immediately end this situation. We are concerned for your
personal safety and the harm that may come to others." The
FBI over the weekend allowed several individuals to enter the
compound, although they would not identify who those people were.
Two vehicles entered the ranch on Saturday afternoon, then
shortly before dark a pickup with Wyoming license plates carrying
four people entered the compound. A network crew with a
high-powered camera lens saw a group of arriving visitors hugging
and talking with Freemen in their compound. At least one of the
vistors allowed through was an intermediary sent by relatives of
those on the farm.

Authorities were less willing to let others into the compound.
On Friday they turned away two militiamen from Oregon, heavily
armed, who had driven to Montana with groceries for the Freemen.
They also turned away two members of a local militia (Gordon
Helgerson and Kamala Web), and Kevin Entzel, the stepson of
arrested Freeman Petersen. Entzel hoped to visit his mother,
Cherlyn. People wanting to visit the Freemen compound were asked
if they were carrying fuel, groceries, firearms or ammunition;
those supplies were confiscated, or the visitors would not be
allowed to proceed. Other militiamen, in twos and threes, also
began showing up in the area, ignoring the calls of John
Trochmann to stay away. Two militiamen even managed to break
through the loose perimeter to join the Freemen. Stewart
Waterhouse, a militia leader and fugitive from Oklahoma
authorities, along with Barry Nelson, drove a Ford Taurus through
a roadblock and on to the perimeter, adding to the number of
people holed up on the Clark ranch. More people began to offer
their services as intermediaries as well, including Randy Weaver,
though the FBI did not leap at such offers.

However, neither petitions nor the pleadings of law
enforcement officials could convince the remaining Freemen to
give up. Some people speculated that Rodney Skurdal, perhaps the
most violent and radical of the Freemen, was holding the others
in line. "It's a pity they didn't get Skurdal," one
local lamented, "His proclamations are as heinous and as
hate-filled as can be." However, ninety miles away, another
Freeman fugitive, Richard Clark, turned himself in voluntarily to
authorities. Clark had not been on the ranch on the Monday when
Schweitzer and Petersen were arrested. When arraigned in federal
court on April 1, Clark refused to accept a lawyer or to give his
name, stating that his name was "private." He also
briefly refused to eat food.

Also uncompliant were captives Petersen and Schweitzer,
neither of whom were inclined in the least to cooperate with
authorites. Indeed, they refused to bathe or change their
clothes, while Schweitzer embarked upon a hunger strike, causing
his removal over the weekend to a federal detention center in
Springfield, Missouri, that handled sick prisoners, so that his
health could be monitored. In Palmdale, California, Broderick and
her associates were equally stubborn. A court hearing had been
scheduled for April 1 in Los Angeles for a requested injunction
of Broderick's check-issuing schemes, but the Freemen--Broderick,
Adolf Hoch and Laura Marie Hoey--did not show up. A woman who
refused to give any other name than "Myra" appeared in
court and said she was filing a response to the injunction
prepared by Broderick's attorney. Judge William Keller barred
Broderick first from filing liens against a postal service
employee, then issued a second injunction against the
distribution of her bogus checks. Broderick defiantly continued
to hold her seminars (by videotape), though she prudently did not
hand out checks. "I am just appalled to think that a federal
judge, someone who we're supposed to admire and respect, is
committing a fraud," Broderick said, butter not melting in
her mouth.

Over the second week of the standoff, the Freeman
ever-so-slightly softened their stance, agreeing to negotiations
with a small group of state legislators (Democrats Joe Quilici
and John Johnson; Republicans Karl Ohs and Dick Knox). The
negotiators and the Freemen met on April 4 and 5 in a mobile home
near the ranch house; authorities, it seemed, hoped that they
might convince the Freemen to surrender on Easter Sunday, April
7, because of the religious significance of that holiday.
Reporters and television crews, already becoming bored in the
tiny town, seized upon this remote chance as a ticket home. The
standoff had already become a matter of routine to many: take a
look at the Freemen, speak to authorities, speak to local
residents, try to file a story if possible, then get some sleep
at whatever dismal place you could find a room and a roof. Only
the occasional oddball or incident punctuated the routine, such
as when two country-western disc jockeys from Spokane,
Washington, drove into town to erect a big flag saying "We
Come in Peace" in view of the Freemen's farm.

On Friday, April 3, the first cracks in the veneer of the
Freemen appeared, as two people left the ranch: Val Stanton and
her small daughter, Mariah. Val was not wanted on any federal or
state charges. A relative of the Stantons predicted that this
meant that Ebert and Agnes Stanton would also soon be leaving the
compound, and indeed, that turned out to be the case; they left
on April 6, to be taken into custody after officials blocked a
caravan of media vehicles from following them. However, the rest
of the world was not without cracks itself; as early as April 5,
a state senator, Casey Emerson of Bozeman, a man with ties to the
militia movement, advocated serious concessions on the part of
the government, including offering them money, dismissing some of
the charges, and allowing them to give a presentation on national
television. He also suggested that the Freemen be allowed to face
a "common law" jury, "so they can get their
bitching done." Other Freemen and militia members across the
Northwest also supported the notion of a special grand jury for
the Freemen. Ohio militiaman Don Vos travelled to Montana to stay
with Freeman Lyle Chamberlin and monitor the standoff.

Moreover, despite the departure of the Stantons, the
negotiations failed. "It's a very, very volatile
situation," legislator Joe Quilici explained on Sunday,
April 7. "Right now, I can't be optimistic." Indeed,
the Freemen continued to insist on their own government and their
own grand jury. The Stantons seemed to have left more because of
the intervention of family member Butch Anderson than through any
talks between the Freemen and authorities. Nick Murnion, one of
the most experienced hands in dealing with the Freemen, was
convinced that a firm approach was needed. "The only way
negotiating works is if you apply pressure from a position of
strength, and they are not doing that." Murnion wanted, at
the very least, to tighten the perimeter, cut off utilities, and
prohibit visits from family and friends. Instead, the FBI eased
off even more, allowing Representative Karl Ohs to promise the
Freemen a "mechanism whereby their story could be
heard." But Jim Pate, the Soldier of Fortune magazine
reporter who had managed to visit the Freemen in their compound
during the siege, reported that negotiations had failed, that the
Freemen were not willing to meet with any federal government
officials, and that they were content to wait for a long time.
Indeed, on April 8, the Freemen posted a press release on their
gate for authorities and media to find which declared the
"independence" of Justus Township. "It should be
further made known to all Men," read the proclamation in
typical freemen pseudo-legalese, "that this republic, Justus
Township, Montana state, united States of America, so affirmed in
Law is NOT that de facto fiction, the corporation, incorporated
in London, England in the year of Yeshua, the Christ, eighteen
hundred seventy-one, A.D., the United States, a corporation, so
defined as their own Title 28 U.S.C. 3005 (A)(15)."

In the meantime, the siege was quiet. The children of the
Freemen played in their compound, while the Freemen themselves
patrolled the perimeter less, though they did post a notice
asking that the media stay a half-mile away. The FBI leisurely
monitored the Freemen, at a cost that local officials estimated
at $300,000 per day. The FBI maintained the checkpoints and
several communications outposts. The media also kept watch the
Freemen, from a distant ridge, even bringing porta-potties to
make the vigil more bearable. The few supporters of the Freemen
tried to win people over to their cause; two of them, Warren
Stone and Steve McNeil, even tried to hold a press conference,
which mostly consisted of the two radicals accusing the media of
lying. In Oregon, which had some Freemen problems of its own,
Wasco County extremists warned that the standoff could end in
violence. Some militia leaders, such as Ray Looker of the West
Virginia-based Mountaineer Militia, threatened violence if the
FBI tried to take the compound by force. In mid-April a group of
twenty militia leaders from a dozen different states issued a
fiery proclamation stating that the activities of the FBI were
"unlawful" and that any injury or loss of life would be
considered by the militia "an act of war," following
which they would "no longer restrain our brethren."

But the most vocal person continued to be Norm Olson, who
suggested that the "second American revolution" might
break out at Jordan and that he might be its battlefield
commander. "People like Don Vos, myself and a host of others
who might be called hard-line represent the worst possible
nightmare--the loosing of the dogs of war," the Michigan
militiaman said. Olson, after promising for some time to travel
to Montana, finally showed up in mid April, dressed in military
fatigues and accompanied by sidekick Roy Southwell and attorney
Scott Bowman, announcing to reporters that he planned to bring
the children of the Freemen a teddy bear. He appeared at the FBI
command center on April 16, to inform the feds that he would be
going through the perimeter and to make vague threats. "We
will discuss either the terms of the FBI's surrender," he
later reported that he told the FBI, "or...the order of
battle." He also distributed fliers to agents which read
"FBI-ATF, are you ready to die because of the corruption
within?" Not surprisingly, FBI agents refused to talk to
Olson. Olson proceeded towards the ranch, but was stopped by a
roadblock several miles from the compound. On Wednesday, the next
day, he tried again, but was once more denied access. Not even
citing the Geneva Convention rules of war moved the hearts of the
federal and state officers. Olson took the opportunity to shout
at the officers and the reporters who had followed him. By
Friday, Olson had become somewhat of a joke to reporters, locals,
and law enforcement officers. Unable to visit the Freemen, he had
little to do in the small town of Jordan, so he spent much of his
time in the town's restaurant. One FBI agent labeled Olson and
Southwell "Yogi Bear and Boo-Boo." At one point the
militia leader became angry at a smirking FBI agent, telling the
officer, "You come up to Northern Michigan, Mister, and I'll
see you in my crosshairs."

Olson was not the only vocal militant. From his jail cell,
Daniel Petersen continued to issue documents full of Freemanese,
including "writs of mandamus" demanding that charges
against him be dropped and he be released from jail. One writ
threatened U.S. Attorney Sherry Matteucci with a $1,000 per day
fine, and imprisonment, unless she released him. Other
incarcerated Freemen were somewhat less defiant. In Missouri,
Leroy Schweitzer dropped his hunger strike, deciding instead to
resort to a spartan protest diet, and his daughter Brandie hoped
that he might be returned to Montana. The two Stantons who had
surrendered, Agnes and her son Ebert, were considerably quieter
in court than Schweitzer, Peterson, and Richard Clark had been.
Though they pleaded not guilty, they did not yell at the judge or
claim he had no authority. Agnes Stanton was released from jail
by the court, ordered to remain in "house arrest" at
the residence of another son in Billings, Montana, and to wear an
electronic monitor twenty-four hours a day. The court denied bail
to Ebert Stanton.

But the Freemen still inside "Justus Township" were
as defiant as ever. They placed a sign outside the main building
in the compound which read: "Grand Jury. It's the law. Why
not? Who fears the evidence?" Several of them started
plowing the fields of the ranch, an act that infuriated the legal
owners of the property, who were already dissatisfied with the
slow course of the siege. "Something has got to be done
about this, and soon," said one of the owners, K. L. Bliss,
"There are four families facing heavy financial losses if
they can't get on that land...Yet those freemen are thumbing
their noses at us, saying hell with the federal government, and
hell with the landowners. Heck, we thought the FBI was the
cavalry coming to save us, but they turned out to be a bunch of
baby-sitters." Bliss and rancher Tom Stanton, who had leased
state grazing land claimed by the Freemen, were emerging as the
most vocal of the local residents who demanded action. "We
feel it is time for them to show [the Freemen] that they are
going to squeeze them," Stanton said of the FBI. Bliss and
Stanton wanted the FBI to seize a hill overlooking the compound,
which the Freemen used as an observation post; they also wanted
the FBI to have a more visible presence, to remind the Freemen
that they were there. Stanton moved his cattle onto the leased
land, defying the Freemen to do something about it. "I have
a feeling the local people are going to get real upset unless the
FBI does something real quick," he predicted. But Stanton
and Bliss did not necessarily represent the opinions of the
community. Taking an opposing viewpoint was rancher Cecil
Weeding, who didn't want to see any bloodshed. "I think
people realize the restraints the FBI is operating under,"
he said. "They don't want to go in there and massacre those
people."

Some in the FBI were no doubt also tired of the siege, though
for different reasons. At first the area was covered with snow;
then, as temperatures rose, the land turned to mud that covered
everything. The temperature remained cold and the winds bitter,
especially for monitoring agents who had only livestock sheds for
shelter, and sleeping bags and propane heaters to keep them warm.
On April 17, some agents did move into a new command post set up
in the former home of Will and Agnes Stanton. The FBI had no
choice but to remain, but the media horde could leave, and many
began to do so, as the standoff dragged on. Their comings and
goings followed a predictable pattern; arriving en masse at the
beginning of the siege, they quickly exhausted the story,
especially since the FBI itself was particularly uncommunicative.
Like a star exhausting its hydrogen and turning to burning
helium, the reporters then began to cover the opinions of the
local residents. A local store made t-shirts to sell which asked,
"Have You Been Interviewed Yet?" Finally, they were
reduced to covering each other, a cannibalistic stage that could
not last long. Many pulled out stakes, leaving only a skeleton
crew of reporters behind. Those who remained depended on the
"Weenie Babes," Vicci Wheeler of Cody, Wyoming, and
Kathy Boscole of Billings, Montana, who cooked hot dogs and warm
meals for reporters and government officials.

Not until April 17 did the Freemen deign to meet with
negotiators again, when five of them talked for an hour or two
hours with Karl Ohs and state prosecutor John Connor. April 19,
the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing and the end of the
Waco siege, passed without incident, although officials stepped
up their presence, just in case. Over the weekend, the FBI
allowed a group of visitors to the Freemen that included Janet
Clark, wife of Edwin Clark and mother of Casey Clark. Again,
hopes rose among locals and reporters that the siege might soon
be at an end, but in fact, there seemed to be no real reason for
high hopes. On Thursday, April 25, FBI agents and state police
turned away three would-be negotiators and celebrities in the
patriot movement. Bo Gritz, his friend and former police officer
Jack McLamb, and Randy Weaver showed up in Jordan to speak to the
Freemen and offer their services as negotiators, but were not
allowed to pass through the perimeter. That same day, despite
more talks with Ohs and Connor, the Freemen released another
statement questioning the government's legitimacy and stating
that they did not consider themselves liable to federal or state
law. Ohs said of the talks that some progress was made, but would
not elaborate.

One chapter in the Freemen's saga did reach closure when, many
miles from the Clark ranch, federal attorneys in California
finally unsealed an indictment against Elizabeth Broderick,
charging her and four assistants with thirty counts of fraud,
counterfeiting and conspiracy. Also named were Adolph Hoch, his
daughter Laura Marie Hoey, Barry Switzer and Julian Cheney. They
were arrested April 25 and taken into custody. Because federal
officials claimed evidence that Broderick was planning to flee
the country, she was denied bail, as were Switzer and Hoch. Hoey
was released pending $25,000 bail. Defiant to the end, Broderick
denied that the court had any jurisdiction over her, and threw
the indictment on the floor. Later, a judge had to plead not
guilty on Broderick's behalf, since she refused to enter a plea
of her own.

With the siege having lasted for well over a month, the FBI
and other authorities were looking under every rock for something
with which they might persuade the Freemen, or at least some of
them, to come out. They even decided to let Bo Gritz and Jack
McLamb--though not Randy Weaver--try to negotiate with the people
on the Clark ranch. Few people in law enforcement liked either
Gritz or McLamb, but the fact that the two had some amount of
credibility in the patriot movement, coupled with their
successful intervention at Ruby Ridge, made it seem worth a try,
particularly since everything else had failed. Nick Murnion
represented the more optimistic. "There's some hope,"
he explained. "I think he...is of the right political
persuasion, and certainly probably has more credibility with
these folks than a lot of potential negotiators. So he does seem
to offer them the possibility to come out in a more dignified
manner." Of course, such optimism assumed that the Freemen
were looking for a way to come out.

At first, the Gritz-McLamb intervention seemed to promise some
success. They spent seven hours talking with the Freemen on April
27, longer than any other session that had occurred. Moreover,
militiaman Stewart Waterhouse finally gave himself up to
authorities, leaving the compound he had entered several weeks
earlier. But when Bo Gritz spoke to the press, observers could
come away only with mixed impressions. While suggesting that he
thought the situation was "bridgeable," Gritz admitted
that the Freemen still demanded a common law grand jury.
Moroever, Gritz seemed fundamentally to misunderstand the
Freemen, representing them as "salt of the earth," and
suggesting that they "have no white supremacy, separatist
tendencies that I saw. None at all...They brought up the fact and
said, where is the media getting the idea we have any prejudice
or bias?" Perhaps the media was getting it from the reams of
documents filed in Montana's courts in which Rodney Skurdal and
the other Freemen spewed their racial diatribes at great length.
In any event, there was something that Gritz was not
"getting."

On the third day of negotiations with Gritz, the Freemen
suggested that they would surrender if they could speak before
the Montana legislature (which, having biennial sessions, was not
due to meet until 1997). It is unclear if it was a serious offer.
One suggestion that both Gritz and the authorities tried to make
to the Freemen was the possibility of reduced or dropped charges.
The negotiators targetted Gloria Ward and her two daughters, and
the three Hances. "The Hances are a wonderful family. And
it's all over a tiny thing about a license plate," Gritz
exclaimed, forgetting the assault on a police officer. Utah
authorities were willing to drop custody charges against Ward,
while North Carolina officials promised the Hances that none
would serve more than four months in jail for the local charges
there. And even the state of Montana bent over backwards,
offering to drop some local charges.

But it seemed to Gritz and McLamb, as well as other people who
had been inside the compound such as Jim Pate, that the camp was
divided into two groups, one somewhat willing to cut a deal but
the other adamant against any negotiation, the latter (including
Rodney Skurdal, Dale Jacobi, Dana Dudley and Russell Landers)
having control. Neither the Wards nor the Hances left the
compound, despite the hopes of negotiatiors. At times the Freemen
seemed to be playing with negotiators, at one point suggesting
that Colorado state senator and militia sympathizer Charles Duke
could be a negotiator; at another point even requesting
Reagan-era Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork as a full-time,
live-in third-party mediator. Finally, the Freemen refused all
the offers, telling Gritz that all members of Justus Township had
made an "affirmation" to God not to surrender;
moreover, they stated that God had placed an invisible barrier
around the farm that protected the Freemen from outsiders. And
they restated their demands for a common law court of male,
"non-14th Amendment" citizens not government employees
or in debt to anyone. In the end, they defeated all the
negotiators--Connor, Ohs, Gritz and McLamb--with their
unwillingness to budge one inch.

The Freemen remained completely intransigent, despite the five
days of negotiations between the Freemen and Gritz and McLamb, as
well as the parallel negotiations with the authorities and the
various offers of reduced or dropped charges. In the end, a
statement McLamb made before he and Gritz entered the compound
turned out to be prophetic. He told reporters that he would tell
the Freemen that the court system still worked and that some of
the charges were not serious. But he admitted that "in order
to solve the problem, you have to deal with reality," and
the Freemen still were fundamentally divorced from any connection
with reality.

Proof of that fact came shortly after the Gritz-McLamb
negotiations failed, when the Freemen rejected an offer from the
FBI to meet on May 2 under a "flag of truce" to discuss
an end to the standoff. The FBI proposed in their offer a meeting
at a local community hall with two FBI agents and the two Montana
negotiators. It even promised to work for a "mechanism
leading to a legislative forum following your court
arraignment." Coupled with the offer was a veiled threat:
"Failure to pursue meaningful dialogue through this meeting
will indicate your lack of genuine interest in seeking a peaceful
and equitable solution. In this case, the FBI will reserve the
right to take whatever action it deems necessary to resolve the
situation."

The FBI needn't have wasted the ink; the Freemen's only
response was to say that the FBI "does not exist as a
government agency." They did, however, have words for the
press, including a videotape for the media explaining their
position, along with a 13-page document accompanying it. The
videotape contained about 45 minutes of a speech by Russell
Landers explaining that the FBI is not constitional and is, in
fact, illegal in Montana. It also described how the "United
States" was a corporation, while the "United States of
America" was a republic. And it reiterated that if
authorities and the media proved the Freemen wrong, then they
would be willing to surrender. "We're gonna let you be the
judge," Landers said on the video. Negotiations were not on
the calendar.

FUTURE

For the Freemen on the Clark ranch in Jordan, Montana, the
siege continues. It remains uncertain whether there is less or
more chance of violence than before. The authorities have been
patient so far, but when South Carolina Senator Ernest Hollings
on May 2 told Attorney General Janet Reno that "We can't
make a mockery out of law enforcement. Law enforcement just can't
sit around waiting for a peaceful settlement," Reno's only
answer was, "I know." Bo Gritz suggested that
authorities simply walk up and announce that the Freemen were
under arrest. Also antsy were some of the local residents, but
the chances that they would defy both the Freemen and the feds
seem slim. The longer the Freemen prove unwilling to negotiate,
the greater the chance of decisive action by the federal
authorities.

How the siege will resolve itself, and how the Freemen will
hold up in court, remains to be seen, but the Montana Freemen
have already had an important--and surely unintended--impact on
the country, for in creating a standoff they created even more
publicity for their bogus checks, bogus liens and bogus courts
than had existed previously. Though the problem of "common
law" courts and "sovereign citizens" exists across
the country, in some areas in crisis proportions, most Americans
had not heard of them at all, or if they had, assumed that they
were merely harmless cranks. But the publicity generated by the
Freemen gave or is giving impetus to efforts in states like
Missouri, Ohio, Idaho, Montana, and others to clamp down on
common law courts and their dangerous practices. The
Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith released a model law
against common law courts that is indeed an admirable model for
states to follow. Many states have begun to come up with their
own solutions. Though the problems of vigilante courts and
right-wing anarchists will remain for some time to come, they are
finally being recognized as a threat and steps are finally being
made to protect the innocent people and faithful public officials
who have so far had to deal with their paper guerilla tactics.

In the end, it comes down to the notion of sovereignty. The
Founders vested sovereignty in the people, but not in the
individual. In this country, every man is -not- a king, contrary
to the capricious wishes of Leroy Schweitzer and Rodney Skurdal;
rather, men and women cooperate to establish an equitable set of
rules for all to follow. As the poet John Donne said, "No
man is an island." And no person is a sovereign answerable
to no one else.